By DAVID DISHNEAU and BEN NUCKOLS Associated Press Writers

HAGERSTOWN – In the nine years before Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace, assassins killed a U.S. president, a presidential contender and the nation’s leading civil rights activist. In the 35 years since, attempts on two presidents’ lives have failed.

As Bremer was released Friday from prison after serving two-thirds of his 53-year sentence, a former Secret Service agent said the attack on the Alabama governor during a presidential campaign stop in Laurel, Md., prompted lifesaving changes in security strategies.

“Every attempt triggers the implementation of additional countermeasures,” said Joseph A. LaSorsa, who retired in 1996 and runs a security firm in Pompano Beach, Fla.

Bremer, 57, left the Maryland Correctional Institution near Hagerstown before dawn Friday after serving 35 years for attempted murder. He didn’t speak to reporters and doesn’t want to, state prison officials said.

“He’s kept a decidedly low profile,” state Parole Commission Chairman David R. Blumberg said. “He’s turned down all requests for notoriety and interviews, including some that had money attached to them.”

Bremer earned his mandatory release through good behavior and by working in prison.

The Division of Parole and Probation will supervise him until his sentence ends in 2025, the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services said.

The agency didn’t say where in the state Bremer has gone to live, except that it wasn’t in Washington County, where the prison is located. Privacy will allow Bremer “to become acclimated to today’s world at his own pace and with as much anonymity as possible,” an agency statement read.

Under the conditions of his release, Bremer must stay away from elected officials and candidates. He must undergo a mental health evaluation and receive treatment if the state deems it necessary, and he can’t leave Maryland without written permission from the parole commission. The conditions also require Bremer to submit to electronic monitoring.

Wallace and three others were wounded May 15, 1972, in the shooting outside a busy shopping center.

Bremer, then 21, grew up in Milwaukee during an era of remarkable violence against national public figures. President Kennedy’s murder in 1963 was followed by the assassinations in 1968 of the Rev. Martin Luther King and, two months later, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.

Bremer likened himself in his diary to President Lincoln’s killer, John Wilkes Booth.

LaSorsa said armored vehicles were put into use for presidential motorcades after President Kennedy’s assassination. He said the Secret Service started offering protection to presidential candidates after Robert Kennedy was slain. Since the Bremer attack, agents have scouted campaign stops much more thoroughly before candidates arrive.

“Protection today is much more proactive than it ever has been,” LaSorsa said.

Nick J. Zarvos, who was shot in the neck as a member of Wallace’s Secret Service detail, said audiences at today’s political events are often screened by metal detectors – something unheard of in 1972.

“You just try to stay ahead of the game,” he said.

Today, many candidates eschew appearances in wide-open areas such as mall parking lots, and limit interaction with ordinary voters. Rudy Giuliani travels with a private security, and his crew has been known to whisk him away quickly from events.

Secret Service details travel with Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, but other candidates say that level of protection would cramp their style.

“I’ve never done it. After we won New Hampshire in 2000, they really tried to get us, but we said no,” John McCain said Friday in Concord, N.H. “It’s an invasion of your ability to have contact with voters.”

Security consultant Ned Timmons, a former FBI agent in Walled Lake, Mich., said the assassination attempts and, more recently, school shootings, have made citizens more willing to tell police about threat signals – and officers more eager to act on them. Treating dangerous behavior early may prevent assassination attempts, he said.

“I think that if a person has a tendency to rely on deadly force or think about deadly force, if that’s not treated, it could escalate,” Timmons said.

Modern electronics enable authorities to eavesdrop on suspects’ conversations more easily than in the 1960s, Timmons said.

Bremer case quick facts

·Arthur Bremer was not paroled. In fact, the Maryland Parole Commission denied him parole 10 years ago.

· The Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS) did not “let Bremer out early.” Bremer is getting out now because of state law that allows inmates to earn credits to shorten their time spent behind bars. This is state law, not DPSCS policy.

· These credits are awarded for work assignments, educational programming and special projects, in addition to good conduct. Bremer’s work and behavior in prison earned him many such credits.

· Those released from sentences affected by credits are mandatory releasees, because, by law, they must be freed from prison.

· Mandatory releasees like Bremer are required to be under the supervision of Parole and Probation agents until the end of their original sentences. In Bremer’s case, his entire 53-year sentence expires in 2025, meaning he will be required to report to his agent regularly until 2025. If he violates this, or any special condition of his release, he is subject to arrest and reincarceration.

Source: Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services

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Security Expert: Former Secret Service Agent, Presidential Protection

Virginia Tech Campus Shooting Incident: The Aftermath

A college campus, by nature is an open environment, where students and visitors can come and go freely, almost without restriction. There is no absolute blueprint for school, campus or facility security. Each site and environment usually has their own specific individual idiosyncrasies and issues.

Security experts attempt to develop and seek security solutions with minimal impact and inconvenience, with as minimal an impact to the social environment as possible. Their focus is to enhance security efforts, attempting to balance openness and free access with the need for monitoring and with reasonable limits on access.

Many comments have been made and many fingers have been pointed. Some questions sweeping across the nation and fueled by the media are:

• Should guns be banned and outlawed?

• Was this senseless massacre foreseeable and preventable?
• Did the Campus Security and Police react appropriately?
• What can we do to prevent this incident from occurring in the future?

• How can we protect ourselves from similar threats?Vital and instrumental government agencies in Virginia, the school medical department at Virginia Tech were prevented from sharing information by legal restrictions, while others who could have helped, just failed to do so, resulting in critical information deficits within agencies who could have intervened.

Law enforcement and security professionals have developed matrices for identifying potential violent behavior for several years. Unfortunately predicting violent behavior is not an absolute science. The media did a great job informing all of us of Cho Seung-Hui’s past unusual and bizarre behavior. Monday morning quarterbacking is easy. The question is this; did the critical decision makers have sufficient information relating to Cho-Seung-Hui’s behavior prior to the shooting incident? Obviously not! Given the facts which have emerged after the fact, most individuals, professional or not, would have no difficulty in concluding he was a potential threat and a time bomb waiting to explode.

The warning signs, red flags and clues were there. This occurrence is unfortunately, all too similar. As in 9-1-1, in almost every past school violence incident, as well as in this incident at Virginia Tech, there were social, governmental and institutional failures and restrictions which allowed this incident to play out. Once again, privacy issues and bureaucratic restrictions prevented agencies, entities and persons who had bits of relevant information, to assemble, compare, and examine for patterns and indications of potential violence and to implement an intervention and possibly preventing Cho Seung-Hui from murdering the 32 Virginia Tech students and professors before taking his own life. Unfortunately, there were and are no sufficient mechanisms in place and the problem is compounded by the fact many large organizations, institutions, schools, governmental entities, and corporations, lack the training and experience with which to handle this type of situation. These incidents will continue to occur and plague us until we do something about it. Creating “gun free zones” and adding armed Police and Security officials to the equation are not the answer. Preventing “honest” and “good” people from owning and possessing guns is not the answer. If we do that, the only the “criminals” will possess guns – and then where will we be?

In conclusion, “the signs were there, but no one saw them” – is an all too familiar occurrence. The truth is usually there were too many people looking. Unfortunately, they are usually people not trained to identify the aberrant behavior and escalate it. In addition, security policies announcing more stringent measures and posture without mechanisms to support and ensure the successful execution of that security posture are senseless and non-effective.

Despite the fact we live in a overly litigious society, the solution to the issue of school violence must eventually come down to, we, our school administrators and officials, must do all that we can to solicit our legislators to change laws that specifically restrict and prevent our schools and society to establish and implement measures which will allow our school administrators, relevant agencies and individuals, the ability to collect, coordinate and evaluate the available information concerning an individual student’s “behavior” in its totality. We must give our school faculty, administrators and relevant agencies the ability to pro-actively act in the best interest of the school society and our society as a whole and not prohibit their actions due to fears of legal reprisals and consequences. The system as it current exists is self-defeating.

By:

Joseph A. LaSorsa, CPP

(U.S. Secret Service – ret.)

Security Expert and Consultant

J.A. LaSorsa & Associates

www.lasorsa.com

1645 SE 3rd Ct., Suite 102

Deerfield Beach, FL 33441

Tel: 954-783-5020

Police: Delivery man robs billionaire, making off with several hundred dollars

The Associated Press

Published: February 7, 2007

SAN DIEGO: A phony delivery man forced his way into the house of a billionaire, and bound him, his wife and a housekeeper with duct tape before making off with only a few hundred dollars, police said Wednesday.

Investigators say the intruder specifically targeted Ernest Rady, a financier ranked No. 140 last year on Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans.

Rady, 69, was not home when the suspect arrived at the La Jolla residence Tuesday afternoon, said San Diego police Capt. Mary Cornicelli.

The intruder buzzed the intercom and asked for “Mrs. Rady” to sign some documents, Cornicelli said. After Rady’s wife, Evelyn, and a housekeeper opened the door, the suspect pulled out a handgun and stun gun and forced his way in, police said.

The women were marched through the house at gunpoint as the robber demanded cash, then were taken to the master bedroom and bound with duct tape, Cornicelli said.

Less than two hours later, Rady arrived and was stunned and bound by the intruder.

The man left the house with less than $1,000 (€770) in cash about five hours after arriving, police said. The Radys freed themselves and called police; Ernest Rady was briefly hospitalized with minor injuries.

Police were searching for the man Wednesday. Rady declined to comment on the ordeal when reached by telephone.

Rady, a former part-owner of the San Diego Padres, made a $2.1 billion (€1.62 billion) fortune by establishing Westcorp, one of the country’s largest auto finance companies. It was sold to Wachovia Corp. in 2005 for $3.42 billion (€2.63 billion).

“People may think that because they’re not high profile they don’t need protection, but they’re totally wrong,” said Joseph LaSorsa, a security expert. “Anyone who does their homework can find out where high-net-worth people live.”

Despite not-so-nice finger gestures from some fellow motorists who noticed the campaign stickers on his car, retired U.S. Secret Service agent Joseph LaSorsa won’t let anyone make him feel less than proud of being a McCain-Palin supporter.

So, when someone stole a pair of campaign signs displayed on his front lawn in Lighthouse Point, he went after them.

“I wasn’t going to let them get away with it,” he said.

LaSorsa, 54, ran out of his house and jumped into his car, following a pickup truck down his street just after 1 a.m. on Oct. 25 and then blocking it at an intersection. He borrowed a cell phone and called 911.

Police showed up minutes later, charged five teenagers that were in the truck with theft and recovered a pile of loot from inside the vehicle: more than 100 other McCain-Palin signs allegedly snatched off front lawns.

That’s just some of the shenanigans tied to this fierce election season.

Across Broward County, authorities say they have received countless reports of campaign sign thefts, sign uprootings and sign vandalism. Republicans and Democrats have been targeted.

“It’s sort of an election-season tradition,” said Broward Sheriff’s Office spokesman Jim Leljedal, though he added that things have been mostly quiet. Elsewhere, police and residents share stories of how chats among friends have boiled over into shoving matches. Glances exchanged between drivers with opposing political stickers have sparked road rage.

Some local political figures think the animosity is rooted in the intense passion surrounding the presidential campaign.

“It’s getting out of hand,” said Broward Republican Party Chairman Chip LaMarca, who earlier this month reported to police that someone had broken a window on his Lighthouse Point home.

Police officials, though, say the incidents and sign thefts aren’t all that unusual.

Said Lighthouse Point police Cmdr. Michael Oh: “Every election, we have the same problem.”

Staff Writer Anthony Man contributed to this report.